If Congress fails to pass a bill I can sign by mid-May...[s]ome of our forces now deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq may need to be extended, because other units are not ready to take their places....The bottom line is this: Congress's failure to fund our troops will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines. Others could see their loved ones headed back to war sooner than anticipated. This is unacceptable. It's unacceptable to me, it's unacceptable to our veterans, it's unacceptable to our military families, and it's unacceptable to many in this country.

On April 11, the very next day, Secretary of War Defense Robert Gates said this:

Effective immediately, active Army units now in the Central Command area of responsibility and those headed there will deploy for not more than 15 months and will return home to home stations for not less than 12 months.

The very next day!! And, dare I point out as Stewart did, Gates' action has yet to be denounced by Bush as "unacceptable." Because, his attempts to make this a political issue and shift the blame to the Democrats notwithstanding, this has nothing to do with politics, but necessity - they simply have no other option to continue fighting a war which the country does not want to fight than to force the soldiers they already have a firm grasp on into increasingly difficult situations. Hopefully this will backfire, since it seems guaranteed to ensure that even more soldiers will go AWOL. At least 10,000 have done so already.